Jon Coifman's Blog
Shenzen: Scale + Speed = Epic Environmental Challenge
August 1, 2007
Posted by Jon Coifman in Greening China
James Fallows has been doing great journalism on the intersection of business, economics, culture and trade for more than 20 years. Way back when, it was Japan. Now he's living in China.
This month's Atlantic carries his long piece on manufacturing in Shenzen, an enormous city in the Pearl River Delta that has essentially sprung from nowhere over the past two decades to supply huge amounts of stuff consumed around the world. It's a place where NRDC is increasingly active.
The article is subscription-only, but there is an excellent slide show that captures in pictures both the vast scale of industrial activity in this city and the huge dichotomy between capital-intensive work that goes on alongside highly atomized mom-and-pop shops making all manner of seemingly high tech goods in what is essentially a modern version of cottage labor piecework.
In a similar vein, Andrew Shane Huang has fascinating video and keen observations from inside Chinese manufacturing plants. Again, it is the magnitude and velocity that pops to the fore. He notes the facility where all the world's iPods and iPhones are made has 250,000 employees.
This, friends, is what makes the environmental challenge in China so vast and compelling - the consumption and rearranging of resources (and generation of waste) on an utterly unprecedented scale taking place in an 18th Century economic structure.
Our work is cut out for us.
Boingboing has a couple of other interesting links on this subject today too.
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Comments
Matt Banes — Aug 2 2007 06:15 PM
Just searching for blogs about the globe and how we treat it and came across Switchboard. Appealing content to say the least. How can I get involved? Feel free to view some of my work at GreenCentric. blogspot.com and www.iGreenBuild.com.
Ian Wilker — Aug 3 2007 04:49 PM
Hi Matt,
I'm Ian, the administrator of the Switchboard site and an occasional blogger and link contributor here.
Switchboard is written by NRDC's people -- scientists, policy experts, lawyers, and communicators who work in the trenches every day to make forward progress on dozens of environmental problems. I'm glad you like what we're trying to do here and hope you'll become a regular reader and frequent commenter; our bloggers are crazy busy, but have every intention of carrying on conversations with readers in their blogs. Also, the paint's not yet dry on this first version of the site -- in future, we'll offer other ways for people to participate and talk through solutions to the environmental challenges we all face.